In the dead of night amid the hillside woods of northern Uruguay, his dad held up a spotlight, a huge wild boar a hundred metres away froze momentarily in its glare and, in that split second, Edinson Cavani, brandishing a .243 calibre rifle, hit the target once again.

On a 48-hour break from the Uruguayan World Cup training camp to collect a special 'Illustrious Citizen' award from his home town of Salto, Cavani just had to nip away for a nocturnal hunting session with his old man, killing two boars, six hares and, apparently, some protected creature we are not allowed to talk about. Evidently, he is in good form.

"It's always been footballfirst, then hunting for Edi. He loves it and he's a good shot at both!" says dad Luis, showing off the Paris St Germain marksman's weapon of choice at the picturesque farm that his lad bought him and his partner last year out of his footballing riches.

"We always did it when he was a kid and we still do. He came here from the camp in Montevideo and everything he hadn't done in a whole year while he's been in Paris, he has to cram in over two days. So we spent them fishing and hunting, getting only three hours sleep both nights. It was crazy but he did it."

But isn't coming face to face with a 330lb irritated, tusked combatant in the dark, one potentially more forbidding than Phil Jagielka, a bit barmy so close to a World Cup? What did Óscar Tabárez, the Uruguay coach make of one of the world's finest strikers going all Robert de Niro on him?

"It's OK, we're at a farm lodge, waiting, not running around the hills. It's only dangerous if it's a female boar protecting her baby. Tabárez may know about it or not, he may like it or not but either way, Edi's not going to stop doing it! As for fishing, he always says it calms him. This has always been a way of life for us," smiles Luis.

Welcome to the home he has christened "Paraiso", says Luis proudly. It is the Paradise that Cavani created. We are invited into the farmhouse to see his two latest kills packed into freezers, ready to be prepared for a celebration for family and friends when he returns from Brazil. Edi loves his barbecues, apparently.

In the yard, a pig's head, attracting the flies, dangles and spins slowly from a Paraiso tree. Reared on the farm, the animal had been slaughtered that morning. "It's a shame Edi wasn't here. He likes to kill the pig when he gets home," says Luis.

Bloodthirsty: Cavani Snr said his son 'likes to kill the pig' PHOTO: MARIA INES HIRIART

Cavani's dog Simplicio – named after his old pal at Palermo, the Brazilian international Fabio Simplicio – bounds around with six other family dogs while a couple of ponies the player has bought for his two kids graze in a neighbouring field. His collection of 70 Californian parrots, which he had to leave behind while conquering the football fields of Italy and France, squawk away in a new aviary that Luis has built for them. Edinson is planning another.

Basically, everything about his input into this orange tree-lined idyll on the outskirts of Salto suggests the boy with the Italian heritage – who is now El Matador of Paris, will find his way back here to Salto one day. "I think it's where his heart is," says Luis.

Maybe he will return as one of the game's most feted players. For PSG, Zlatan Ibrahimovic's magic rules; in Uruguay, the nation can hardly see beyond the dodgy knee of his fellow Salteo, Luis Suárez. Yet Cavani needs bow to no one.

Alcides Ghiggia, Uruguay's greatest living player, told me last week that he felt Cavani was the better of the two, because of his strength, hard work and for being a better team player. He is not alone in that view; Cavani is a lean, long striker of exceptional movement and with that deadly aim too.

The glaring misses against Chelsea in this year's Champions League quarter-final represented rare profligacy because the consistency of his quality over the last four seasons with Napoli and PSG has been remarkable, with 129 club goals to his name.

It is a gift founded on graft. The work ethic is everything in the Cavani family. For 20 years, Luis has been keeping the grounds surrounding the Salto Grande hydroelectric dam tidy, driving the company tractor. "Edinson has asked me to stop working, we don't need the money, but I say 'no' because I think the person who stops working is like a car that's left to rot in a garage."

Whenever Luis knows Cavani is coming home, he hops on his tractor to cut the vast field at the back of the house so his lad, who would garden for his neighbours when he grew up at his gran's modest little house in the town, can go running. "He never stops," says Luis. "I saw him training in Paris recently. Everyone else was back in the changing room and he was still working because he felt they didn't train hard enough." It always helped that, from the moment he first played at the age of three the boy, born on Valentine's Day, had football in his veins. Luis had been a decent professional player and coach; Cavani's elder half-brother on his mum Berta's side, Walter Guglielmone, was capped as a striker for Uruguay during a globe-trotting career while his blood brother Christian plays for the Salto club, Atlético Ceibal.

"He started playing at about three and I'd go to see him play 'baby football' when he was eight or nine," recalls Luis. "To inspire him, I'd tell him 'for every goal you score, I'm gonna buy you a Coke and a hot dog'. Then after he scored a hat-trick, I used to end up screaming at the coach 'take him off!'

"But he wouldn't listen to me and Edi kept scoring. Four, five – and I'm shouting at the coach – you do realise I'm having to pay for this!?'"

Then Edi would come off the pitch and say 'Dad, that's five. You have to pay!' Once I'd paid up, though, he went and shared the feast with the whole team."

In his teens, Luis actually coached him at Salto Uruguay. "It was a pleasure for me but much harder for him because other players would say he was only in the team because of me. I just said 'work, train, play and don't care what they say'." Having left Salto for Montevideo at 17, Cavani's career has hardly stopped soaring. He joined Palermo, where his grandfather worked, then went on to become Napoli's biggest star since Maradona, the fanatical supporters' idol, but along with the suffocating fame has come pressure and scandal away from the pitch.

It is true that the tales of Cavani they tell in Salto, and not just from his dad, usually end in what a good bloke he is. Supposedly down to earth, loyal and humble, he is so devout that he was once nicknamed 'Jesus' by team-mates – the biblical locks helped – with even the Archbishop of Naples aiding the image by famously once pronouncing: "God serves himself by having Cavani score goals." But controversy overtook him in Naples when his alleged affair and split from his wife, Soledad, became manna for the gossip columns before he announced their divorce. "Now, he suffers a lot because his ex-wife lives in Naples and he has had problems in seeing his two children (Bautista, 3, and Lucas one)," says Luis.

"But he has a new partner and I'm sure he's going to solve all the problems he has. He deserves things to go well for him, because he's a very good person." Plenty of Napoli fans turned on him as a "traitor" after his £56.7m transfer to Paris, the sixth biggest in the game's history, but Luis reports that Edinson feels "good and comfortable there". Bad news then for his would-be Premier League pursuers.

Luis cannot quite credit his boy's rise. Paternal pride never seemed more aching as when he talks about both Edinson's gift and his generosity. "We used to go fishing in a beautiful lake 30km from here. We'd take the old truck where I used to work and fish from the side while all these big, flash boats were out there. And he'd say 'dad, the day I triumph at football, I'm going to get you a truck and big boat like theirs. He was 11 at the time, he had these big dreams and I would just laugh. But there's the truck and there's the boat," he says, pointing.

"It's hard to express with words the pride you feel when you see your son triumph in life, when you see him open up new paths, you see him loved by people and you see he hasn't changed his way of being, that he remains the same humble child who maintains a low profile and lives his life simply.

"I say it because I'm his father, but everyone would say the same thing. Ask anyone in Salto who knows him, and they'll tell you the same. In short, Edi is one of life's geniuses."